Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2020. x, 281 pp. US$27.99, paper. ISBN 97811501748080.
The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 was the most dramatic event in the twentieth-century history of Russia. A fierce dispute over its historical role has continued ever since. The Marxist radicals in Russia unleashed a civil war, which resulted in terrible atrocities on both sides and the expulsion of over one and a half million people. During Stalin’s Great Purge, 750,000 people were executed without trial and over 20 million were sent to gulags. This unprecedented violence unleashed by Marxist radicals against their own compatriots, along with their policies and ideology, inevitably had an influence on neighbouring countries. Tatiana Linkhoeva’s book thoroughly examines the influence on Japan of this radical political experiment in the Soviet Union. Her study boldly addresses a broad range of complex issues and carefully unravels the intricate tangle of political currents.
In part 1, the first chapter explores the history of relations between Russia and Japan in the imperial period, identifying Russia’s geopolitical rivalry and the mixture of European and Asian elements as two of the most important notions in Japan’s understanding of Russia. The second chapter examines how the social upheaval of 1917 was received in Japan. The February Revolution of 1917 was welcomed by many intellectuals in Japan as a liberation from backwardness, but the October coup was met with caution. Linkhoeva analyzes the debate in the Japanese government, surrounding the decision to dispatch troops to Russia in the Siberian Intervention, which she characterizes as “a strange war” with “no clear enemy identified” (65) and an action largely unpopular within political circles and with the public. The third chapter demonstrates how the Soviet communists tried to convince Japanese politicians that the Soviet Union was not a radical state. Some pro-Soviet politicians and public commentators in Japan believed their Soviet counterparts and pushed for “peaceful coexistence with Soviet Russia in East Asia” (68). The social upheaval in Russia affected Japan’s political thinking and dovetailed with the rise of Pan-Asianist ideology. “Pan-Asianists’ and pro-Soviet politicians’ coordinated efforts” demonstrated that “foreign affairs began to be viewed as the key and only solution to Japan’s domestic issues” (68). Chapter 4 discusses how “concern over the communist threat in the 1920s united disparate groups such as liberals and conservative bureaucracy” (100). Taishō liberals like Yoshino Sakuzō and Fukuda Tokuzō saw the extended franchise and democratic reforms as the only solution “that could unite the nation against the external destabilizing threat” (103) of communism. They believed that the Bolshevik coup “originated in Russia’s peculiar political and social circumstances” (103) and differed from the conventional understanding of socialism. Linkhoeva offers her explanation on the failure of Taishō liberalism and demonstrates that some of its students moved to more appealing left-wing radicalism, but also mentions that even “prominent liberal journalists Murobuse Koshin and Oyama Ikuo … attacked Bolshevism as another type of autocracy” (104). The author concludes that “the tragedy of interwar liberalism in Japan was that in its keen efforts to distance itself from socialism and communism … it inadvertently contributed to the emergence of a police state in Japan in the 1930s” (123). The reader may disagree with this point. While liberals in Japan could have possibly acted with more skill to prevent the emergence of a police state, seeing the violence of Bolshevik leaders against their own people and their disregard to human life, they had no other option than to distance themselves from communism.
In this regard, it must be emphasized that, in the interwar period, democracy failed in many parts of the world. However, the complete destruction of democratic institutions in Russia in 1917 had the most detrimental consequences for the country and the world. The impact of World War I was greatly augmented by Russia’s earlier defeat in the war with Japan. Nevertheless, the backward imperial regime in Russia had a chance to gradually and peacefully transform itself into a progressive political system—such reforms had already commenced in 1905, although they advanced slowly. However, the fatal combination of war and economic collapse, the abrupt abdication of the emperor, and the incompetence of the Provisional government led to the October coup.
In part 2, chapter 5, Linkhoeva emphasizes how Japanese anarchists “found inspiration in the terrorist tactics” (128) of Russian populists (narodniki). Anarchists in Japan began with a plot to assassinate the emperor, expanded their networks across East Asia, and found new inspiration in the Bolshevik October coup. The struggle with the violence of anarchists “contributed to the emergence of a police state in Japan in the 1930s” (123). Chapter 6 examines the birth of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) with the assistance of the Comintern and demonstrates that the JCP did not accept the Russian model for the seizure of political power. Yamakawa Hiroshi, the main theoretician of the Japanese Left, was “faithful to the principles of Marxist orthodoxy” and insisted on a mass proletarian party rather than a party of revolutionaries (160). Chapter 6 shows that the “JCP retained a degree of independence from the Comintern” (160) and Soviet communists. This was inevitable as the persistent internal strife for leadership in the Soviet Union, along with the purges, caused foreign politicians to feel the Soviet Union was still not operating as a normal state. Chapter 7 focuses on the activities and ideas of Japanese thinker Takabatake Motoyuki.
In the book’s conclusion, Linkhoeva argues that the defeat of Japan in the Changkufeng Incident of 1938 and the Nomonhan War of 1939 forced the hand of the Japanese, and the “government chose not to provoke the Soviet Union any further” (216). Undoubtedly, these two incidents were an important factor in making the Japanese military abandon their plan of going to war with the USSR and led them to select an alternative plan: aggression against the United States. This suggests that geopolitical factors did prevail over ideological ones in Japan’s policy toward the USSR and “responses to the Russian Revolution” (3). The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941 was Japan’s attempt to defend itself from a potential rear attack in the approaching war.
Linkhoeva also concludes that “Japanese leftists might have altered the course” of Japan’s invasion of China “had their response to the Russian Revolution’s supranational vision been different” (219–220). This argument is highly contested. Japanese leftists were influenced by the Russian revolution, but could hardly adopt the ideology and methods from Russian radicals or cooperate with them in the long term. In this sense, this reader would disagree that “the Russian Revolution ended in 1943, when Stalin dissolved the Comintern” (217). It ended in October 1917, when the Bolsheviks established a dictatorship and began cruelly executing their political opponents. This violence could not be tolerated, and Russian society condemned it in the late 1980s, when the communist regime fell.
Revolution Goes East is a detailed and thought-provoking study of Japan’s Left. It can be recommended not only to professional historians and experts on Northeast Asia and Russia, but to anyone committed to understanding the causes and roots of political violence.
Igor Saveliev
Nagoya University, Nagoya